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Kansai is altogether beefier, showier, less cool, more eighties. Getting there is part of the Kansai thrill. The elevated expressway snakes out of Osaka tremendously high above the city, and what a city! One of the great unlovely cities of the world, but what is loveliness when you have such density and massiveness and such a vast, heroically vast, extent of city; and neon-lined canals to boot?

So now we hurtle by bus mile upon mile across the rooftops of Osaka, curving fascinatingly though a whole district of love hotels, their little Disneyesque turrets and crenellations peeping playfully above the great barriers of our expressway, and then ultimately (for Osaka is a hard one to shake off) free of the city we approach a thrilling piece of architectural syntax. For miles I have been watching an improbably tall building in the distance; but what was it doing more or less in the countryside? It was the Rinku Gate Tower of some eighty stories and it stood guard at the point where the expressway flung itself right and across the causeway to the artificial island in the distance where the great Kansai airport lay.

Our bus whipped round the back of the airport and snuck into the departure level. The whole sequence: the relinquishing of the hold of Osaka, the expressway, the tower, the causeway, the airport with its tiny planes toppling earthwards or straining heavenwards on improbably steep trajectories.

And the airport! such splendour! Oh brave new world to have interiors so huge, so gleaming, such splendid restaurants. But Kansai is very eighties, very triumphalist. Its hubris is stunning, confirmed indeed by the alarming fact that the artificial island on which it was constructed is sinking. (Ten metres already since its construction in the eighties.) Debussy wrote a piece of music called La Cathedrale Engloutie, the Submerged Cathedral; are we to anticipate L'Aeroport Englouti? Exotic fish winnowing between the Duty Free counters? 747s on the sea bed?)

How beautiful to sit in this splendour for hours with a book and finally to board a flight to Beijing on Dragon Air. And there should be not too much frustration with the sometimes immense times we have to spend in airports. Five hundred
years ago, when we foolishly imagine the "going was good", passengers had to wait far longer than ourselves for right combinations of tide and wind. We should see airports as a means of travel in themselves, as planes, so easy at
the new HK airport which is the shape of a plane. Once we step inside an airport we are already in a time space envelope; it just happens to be a terrestrial one.

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